Games

When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...

When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:

• The codebase is fucked
• All resources are going to new features
• Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
• Your current dev team is sub par

Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.

And even then it’s sometimes impossible because how much can you keep in your head at once. Everybody specializes on these large projects. I may have 30000 ft view of how things operate but getting down into specifics can be hard. I have some intimate knowledge of the learning management system we develop for, which is way less complex than most games, and there are always little gotchas when you make code or architecture changes.

Absolutely, it's impossible to know how much. But it's a lot easier to grasp that it's rarely just "changing a few lines" when it comes to these types of situations.

Specially since many programmers have encountered clients, managers, etc. who think it's that simple as well.